Martin Blok Johansen

The Way I Understood It, It Wasn't Meant to Be Understood--When 6th Grade Reads Franz Kafka.

Abstract In recent years, literacy problematics and different concepts (Cooperative Learning, Learning Styles) have taken up much of the school’s literature teaching. It has pushed discussions of the professional content into the background. This article takes up the content discussion for renewed debate, but now also with the aim of discussing the literary texts one can present to children in school. The research questions posed are: Which texts can justifiably be presented to children as part of teaching in school? What will happen if 10 to 12-year-old Danish school pupils are presented with classical and canonized texts by authors like Kafka, Proust and Dostoyevsky? How will they react? How will they read the texts? The point of departure for the article is an observational and interview study of a Danish 6th grade’s reading and analysis of classical and canonized adult literature. The study takes its starting point in three concepts rooted in theory, i.e. unpredictability, defamiliarization and entitlement, which are subsequently used to get to grips with the empirical part of the study. The article does not attempt to depict a hard-and-fast picture of all children being equally enthusiastic about the new texts. Instead it presents a picture of a class in which lively literary conversations are conducted. And irrespective of whether the child is one of those who enjoys the texts, whether the children are irritated, challenged or provoked by them, they are never experienced as trivial or irrelevant.

Differences between children and young people: A multiple case study from Denmark

The words ‘children’ (Danish: ’børn’) and ‘young people’ (Danish: ’unge’) are so often combined that they almost have the character of idiomatic expressions. But what differences in the use of the words can be found? This article seeks to study the prevalent, dominant discourses about children and young people. In particular, it endeavours to answer the following question: What is thematized, and how are the thematizations created and maintained? The study is theoretically inspired by Foucault’s discourse analysis. The methodological approach is that of a multiple case study. Thus, it provides examples of how children are typically referred to in positive terms such as innocent, imaginative, cheerful, spontaneous, creative and competent (a surplus discourse), while young people are typically referred to in negative terms such as irresponsible, rootless, violent, dysfunctional, hedonistic and unaccountable (a deficit discourse).

Fall of the public teacher – discourse of intimacy and the teaching profession in Denmark

This article reports on a case study conducted in a Danish municipality with 22 teachers as participants, in the context of a project focused on well-being and key educational competencies. The final aim was that of discovering how their ideal of the good teacher was verbalised. What is it that they thematise? How are thematisations created and maintained? The study is theoretically based on Richard Sennett’s notions on the private–public divide and Michel Foucault’s definitions of power and discourse. It focuses on the manners in which Danish teachers articulate a discourse in which words and phrases otherwise seen in connection with intimate relationships (close friends, sweethearts, parents and children) are prevalent. This shall be defined as a discourse of intimacy, the assumption being that this discourse has become the predominant way in which to talk about the good teacher. Furthermore, the article provides (a) a discussion about the ontology of intimacy; (b) a threefold typology of intimacy, namely confessional, emotional and relational, a categorisation that stems from the teachers’ statements and exchanges when discussing good performance; and (c) a reflection on the concept of mode of intimacy, used in this research to refer to the manner in which teachers put to practice their idea of the good teacher, which is mainly through praise and recognition.

Multilingual Children's Interaction with Metafiction in a Postmodern Picture Book.

When teachers and school librarians choose picture books for multilingual children, they often base their choice on an evaluation of linguistic comprehensibility, content familiarity and cultural appropriateness. This means that postmodern picture books may be excluded. This paper presents a case study of multilingual childrens encounter with a postmodern picture book with distinct metafictional features. In the page-by-page walkthroughs of the book, many of the multilingual children demonstrate a high level of literary competence. They deal with the books metafictional features with great confidence and explicitly call for books which challenge them and break with their expectations as readers. Consequently, it is argued that postmodern picture books should be part of the range of books presented to multilingual children.